Arizona State lineman's understated coming out is a sign of progress

An offensive lineman at a major Division I university came out publicly as gay Wednesday.

Did you miss the story?

Arizona State fifth-year senior Chip Sarafin nonchalantly revealed his sexuality to Compete, a local Phoenix-based magazine for gay sports after telling his teammates last spring. His revelation makes him the first active Division I college football player to come out to the public, which regardless of Sarafin’s playing ability, would have been a massive deal had it happened 15 months ago.

Now? It’s one of a handful of interchangeable headlines in this morning’s sports news cycle, buried in a stack of stories about Tiger Woods’ Ryder Cup withdrawal, NFL preseason happenings and the NBA schedule release.

That’s a good thing.

This isn’t to diminish the courage it still takes for many LGBT people, athletes or not, to feel confident enough to publicly reveal their true selves. But the fact that both Sarafin’s admission and the public reaction to it has been met with such low national fanfare actually seems to be a pretty decent indication of progress.

Sure, there would certainly be a stronger lens if Sarafin, a walk-on who hasn’t seen any game action with the Sun Devils, was a Heisman candidate. But after the groundbreaking announcements by Jason Collins, former SEC defensive player of the year Michael Sam and current Massachusetts basketball player Derrick Gordon, such revelations are going to become more commonplace.

There’s still a need for these athletes to receive support, especially at the college level, which the Arizona State athletics department, Sam and the You Can Play Project instantly did once Sarafin’s story went public.

But the fact that Sarafin’s revelation was just one of the day’s top sports stories and not the dominant one is hopefully a sign that we can eventually get to the place in major team sports where such a detail won’t even warrant a headline at all.
More of today’s big winners:Kirk MacLeod: The former U.N. security expert fought cancer by achieving the biggest athletic triumph of his life.

Chip Sarafin is the first active Division I college football player to publicly reveal he’s gay.

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